Al Beuscher – World Expert on Everything

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I haven’t blogged in about a decade. I’m not sure if I want to share the details of my present loneliness with the world. Fortunately there’s an anonymity inherent in the new over-saturated internet and I expect I can fly beneath the radar for a while.

I moved to the Bay Area just about two years ago now. It has been a new life experience in a life that was becoming a bit too static and predictable in some ways. I think I succeed in filling my life with activities that appear interesting to others but not as well in activities that are actuially interesting to me. I suppose that’s variably true for most people; the repetition within our own lives is not present in other people’s perception when looking in. If you’ve mastered one kind of good day, then someone else visiting will just see it as good, not as the same day you have over and over again.

As a result, sitting around making good food, playing video games, and talking often is a pleasant break for people who come to see me. Some seek it out when they can get it. I imagine being around me is very relaxing; I’m not very judgmental of those around me, I’m a good listener, and I rarely have a lot of will I want to impose on a social situation.

But what’s really happening is that I am terribly lonely, and terribly bored with my patterns, and yet feel trapped inside them. So anyone who is willing to come and share them with me is subject to a high level of fascination because at least they represent something different than what I am used to.

I go through a similar mental process when evaluating most of my behaviors; I try to look at them from the outside and to compare them to people who are in more trouble, or who have less. That’s when I want to spin positive. And when I am less capable of controlling the stream of though, I compare to those who have more than me, who do more, who live more. And I expect that I fall somewhere in the media for the overall population. But it’s disingenuous to compare myself to the median, as I’m capable of more. I am one of these people who is haunted by his potential. Throughout my life I have been told, and demonstrated that I can do more – I think better, I am more adaptable, I am more perceptive than the average dude, I guess. And I don’t mean to brag. In fact I don’t mean to necessarily list these as positives. Because if you have a thing and you don;t use it, then it becomes a source of distress rather than pride. It’s the treadmill you buy that ends up being a repository for dirty laundry. It’s the paint set that collects dust in the basement after a whirlwind of inspiration fizzled into a lifetime of reality.

I’m not exactly depressed. I get up and deal with my life. I care about things. I want things. The apathy I associate with epression is always present to some degree, but presently it is not in control of anything. Granted that can change in a few hours. But in general, the environment here suits me. The Bay has a lot of positive energy to draw on. People are genuinely kind to each other most of the time, BART workers excluded, and I have a lot of good options for activities if I would only do them.

I’m sort of surprised by my life now that I’ve just written a couple paragraphs about it. I didn’t expect to be here now. I don;t have a lot of expectations, really, as they have too often led to disappointment. Unfortunately this has derailed my forward progress in life to some degree. Without a goal, how can you move forward, really?

So right now, these last few months and I expect well into next year, I am trying to form a piocture of my future that appeals. I am trying to remember how to have fun and then find more of it. I am trying to emember what my good self likes to do, and from that, what it might want to do in the greater scheme of things. I suspect, and almost know, that I am going to have to do something more creative professionally; this web carepntry business has never felt so finite, and I am certain that I am not learning enough to keep it up for many more years. I might be persuaded to learn more if I could formulate it into a plan that met the above criteria, but I need to have them first.

Probably my best course of action is to turn on my experimentation; to travel farther outside of my comfort zone than I’ve been allowing, and to let things happen to me more frequently. And in the process, engage in behaviors that will feed my energy a little better and give me a reserve of some size to feed off of. I need a life where I can go out on a Wednesday and not pay for it for 3 days afterward. My constitution at this age need not be so fragile. I can make my body work better than it does.